There is one kind of pain for which nobody has yet found a cure- the pain that

comes from the ending of a relationship. The relationship could be a marriage, a love affair
or a deep friendship, in fact, any strong emotional tie between two people. Such a
relationship may come to an abrupt but premeditated end; or it may simply fade away slowly
as people and circumstances change. You may be the one to “break it off”, with a short note
or a brief phone call. Or you may be on the receiving end, like the soldier who dreads
getting a “Dear John” letter from a girl friend who has got tired of waiting. But however it
ended and whoever decided to end it, the pain is equally hard to bear. It is a sort of death,
and it requires the same period of mourning, the same time for grief.
Although there is no cure for grief, we cannot help looking for one, to ease the pain
and to make us forget our tears. We seek refuge in other relationships, we keep ourselves
busy with work, we try to immerse ourselves in our hobbies. Perhaps we start to drink more
than we should to drown our sorrows or we follow the conventional advice and join a club
or society. But these things only relieve the symptoms of the illness; they cannot cure it.
Moreover, we are always in a hurry to get rid of our grief. It is as if we were ashamed of it.
We feel that we should be able to “pull ourselves together”. We try to convince ourselves, as
we bite on the pillow, that we are much too old to be crying. Some people bury their grief
deep inside themselves, so that nobody will guess what they are going through. Others seek
relief by pouring their hearts out to their friends, or to anyone else who can offer a
sympathetic shoulder to cry on. But after a while, even our friends start to show their
impatience, and suggest with their reproachful glances that it is about time we stopped
crying. They, too, are in a hurry for the thing to be over.
It is not easy to explain why we adopt this attitude to emotional pain, when we
would never expect anyone to overcome physical pain simply by an effort of willpower. Part
of the answer must lie in the nature of grief itself. When the love affair dies, you cannot
believe that you will ever find another person to replace the one who has gone so completely
out of your life. Even after many, many months, when you think that you have begun to
learn to live without your lost love, something- a familiar place, a snatch of music, a whiff
of perfume- will suddenly bring the bittersweet memories flooding back. You choke back
the tears and the desperate, almost angry, feeling that you are no better now than the day the
affair ended.
And yet, grief is like an illness that must run its course. Memories do fade
eventually, a healing skin does start to grow over the wound, the intervals between sudden
glimpses of the love you have lost do get longer. Bit by bit, life resumes the normal flow.
Such is the complexity of human nature that we can even start to feel guilty as these things
start to happen, as if it were an insult to our lost love that we can begin to forget at all.
The important thing to admit about grief, then, is that it will take its time. By trying
to convince ourselves that it ought to be over sooner, we create an additional tension which
can only make things worse. People who have gone through the agony of a broken
relationship- and there are few who have not- agree that time is the “great healer”. How
much time is needed will vary from person to person, but psychiatrists have “a rule of
thumb”: grief will last as long as the original relationship lasted. The sad thing is that, when
the breakdown occurs, we can only stumble over the stories beneath our feet. It is dark
ahead, and you will fail painfully many times before we begin to see the light at the end of
the tunnel.